Electronic Arts Plays Catch-Up After Shrug-Off of Wii

Vikingod

Source: Bloomberg
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Video-game designer Nick Earl spent eight months holed up with his development team rushing to adapt ``The Godfather'' for Nintendo Co.'s Wii.

The reason for the long hours: Earl's employer, Electronic Arts Inc., like some of its competitors, underestimated demand for the Wii, whose motion-activated wand lets players wield a virtual sword, mimic real golf swings or strangle a victim. Instead, game makers put most of their resources into Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3, which was released two days earlier in November with a more conventional hand controller.

Now, publishers are scrambling to get titles to the 3.56 million U.S. and Japanese Wii owners who have made the machine the top-selling game console this year.

Mazuko

Someone mentioned in the Nintendo forum a few weeks ago that Nintendo's only two real problems with the console focuses around one major and one minor issue.

The minor issue is graphical. While many say the game has no real good "graphics" well...I beg to differ. I don't really need HD to play a game. It's nice but simply NOT necessary to play games. Also to be honest alot of the games I have played on the Wii that are not the traditional games Nintendo makes like Wii Play and Wii Sports actually look pretty darn good AND are FUN TO PLAY!!!

The major issue plaguing Nintendo though is third party support. Nintendo ever since the days of the N64 and GC have had a hard time KEEPING decent third party support. Heck alot of developers still don't even have development systems for the Wii to make games, and STILL Nintendo has not released the online play capability to third party publishers to implment into their games.

Short fall? Let the hype die down on the PS3 and 360? Marketing Genious? Who knows but without actual online play for games (Other than the forthcoming new pokemon game) will hurt the Wii in the end. So far Nintendo has won the war in the short run...but what about the long?